Volatile
by hannah415
Summary: She didn't want their help. She didn't want their pity. She didn't want their love. She didn't want anything. (Not anything, but perhaps she wanted someone.) She wasn't stupid; she never had been. She knew that they wouldn't give up, that they would push her and push her until she broke. That they would bring her back. Elena, after Jeremy's death. One-shot. Delena.


**A/N: So this is my first Delena fanfiction ever, so please don't hate me. I would love to hear your thoughts/suggestions! **

**This was sort of inspired by the song No One Would Riot For Less by Bright Eyes, so listen to that while you're reading it, if you want. :) **

**Disclaimer: I (sadly) own nothing. Otherwise, I would not be sitting here crying over these two. (Or, more likely, I still would be.)**

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She hated her newly acute senses, in that moment, with the thunder and rain beating down on the walls like it was fighting for life. She couldn't sleep anymore. She couldn't eat. Her brain wouldn't stop whirring, moving and turning as if it was set on auto pilot. She wanted comfort, but she didn't want to be touched; she wanted love, but she didn't want emotion.

Correction; she wanted emotion, but she couldn't stomach it.

It had stormed for weeks now, the rain drowning the streets, and it seemed so cliché. She was suffocating beneath her grief and her pain, and the world was suffocating beneath an ocean of raindrops. It was almost beautifully metaphorical. She liked the way the lightning lit up the entire room as she sat there on the couch, the curtains pulled back fully. The floor-length windows rattled and the pouring water made them opaque, but she could see the flashes of light and she could hear the thunder.

It drowned out the noise in her brain, in her heart. _Turn it off, _he had said, so she had obeyed. Not because she wanted to (although she did – oh how desperately she did), but because she had to. That damn sire bond.

But that was gone now. Somewhere, deep in the darkened crevice that was once her beating heart, she knew that; she knew that there was no turning back now. Without the bond, how else would they get her to snap out of it, get her back to them?

She wasn't sure she wanted it, at this point.

He had tried – they both had. They tried being kind, too kind (too kind even for Stefan). And then Damon had gotten angry, so angry, and he had cursed and yelled and thrown things. He had backed her up against a wall and screamed until his throat was hoarse and she was bored, and then he had released her from the cage of his arms. And had she responded? Had she fallen and cried and let him wrap his arms around her like he had before?

No. She had said, "Your voice sounds funny." And she had walked away, locked herself away.

She didn't want their help. She didn't want their pity. She didn't want their love. She didn't want anything. (Not anything, but perhaps she wanted _someone_.) She wasn't stupid; she never had been. She knew that they wouldn't give up, that they would push her and push her until she broke. That they would bring her back.

And it would ruin her. She knew that, too. She knew that fragile little Elena couldn't handle the emotion that would come flooding back in full force, because, as a vampire, it wouldn't ease her back into feeling. No, it would pound on her, just like the storm; it would attack her until she couldn't see straight, until the only things visible were the flashes and all she could hear was the pounding of her heart and her head.

She missed the old Elena, sometimes. She wanted that girl back, if not for her sake, then for the boys'. She saw how it ruined them, ruined _him_. He disguised it with anger and rage, but she had always been able to see past that. And what Elena saw was anguish. He was not livid, he was lonely. He was not heated, he was heartbroken. She wanted to feel remorse, feel guilt, _anything_, for him. But she couldn't.

He had told her not to.

Sometimes she heard him murmuring to her in her sleep. "Damn it, Elena," he would whisper, his thumb rubbing soothing circles on her hand. "Come back to me. Or come back to him. I don't fucking care." His head would hang, and she would watch him between her lashes. "Please," he would ask, his voice somber and quiet, "please."

But she couldn't. Because he had told her not to. Not to feel, not to think.

_Just turn it off,_ he had said. _I can help you_, he had said.

And he had helped her; couldn't he see that? She was better, stronger. She could take a breath and not feel as if her lungs were going to cave in. She could stand up and move without the weight of all those dead, all those she had lost, bearing down on her thin back. He had helped her.

But he hadn't helped himself. He had ruined himself; he had taken away her suffering, just as he once took away Jeremy's. But she wasn't totally sure that he had erased it, like he had with Jeremy. It seemed more like transference. His sanity for hers. Her freedom for his prison.

She wanted to feel something for him, for that. Her subconscious was screaming at her, the inner Elena bruising herself trying to escape. Internally, she wanted to hold him, to hug him to her chest and never let him go. To thank him and to slap him. To cry and then to kiss him.

_I love you, Damon_, she had said.

She wanted to tell him that again; and inner Elena whispered those words, over and over, reminding herself. She wanted to tell him that again.

But he had told her not to.

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**A/N: So, please read & review! I'll bake you cookies if you do. (And love you for all of eternity.)**

**Hannah xoxo**


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